1. Field
The following description relates to provisioning of virtual card applets on a secure element of a mobile terminal.
2. Discussion of the Background
With the recent advancements of mobile technology, more features have been added to mobile terminals. Addition of applications related to Global Positioning System (GPS) to mobile office products have made mobile terminals commonplace for many consumers. In order to further utilize mobile technology to better cater to consumer's daily requirements, attempts have been made to provide for a mobile financial management system to replace conventional physical wallets. Specifically, this mobile wallet functionality was sought to be realized through provisioning of card issuer's account information directly into a secure element (SE) of the mobile terminal. The SE may be a smart card chip capable of storing multiple applications, including of account specific information that may not be easily accessed by external parties. A mobile wallet application may have the similar composition as the conventional wallet, which may contain payment cards, member cards, transportation cards, and loyalty cards.
Mobile wallet functionality may be further enhanced by provisioning the user financial credential onto mobile terminals equipped with a Near Field Communication (NFC) enabled chipset. Once the user financial credentials have been provisioned onto the SE of the NFC enabled mobile terminal, the provisioned NFC enabled terminal may transfer information or make payments to another NFC compatible device, such as a Point of Sale (POS) terminal, by coming near within a close distance of one another without physically contacting each other. This type of technology is conventionally referred to as “contactless” technology and a payment made with this technology is referred to as “contactless” payment. Despite the numerous benefits that may be available utilizing the described technology, there has been lack of practical solutions to provision sensitive user information to the NFC enabled mobile terminals.
One possible solution for provisioning mobile wallet cards is to perform the provisioning at a secure facility controlled by the mobile wallet card issuer. However, this solution may require users to bring their mobile terminal to the physical mobile wallet card issuer for provisioning. This process has to be repeated for every mobile wallet card the user seeks to provision at different card issuer facility, making the concept of mobile wallet impractical.
In addition, with much focus on mobile commerce, many competing service providers may seek providing their services to the consumers. However, such services may be offered to the consumer without regard to the mobile terminal capabilities or mobile service providers utilized by the consumers. Due to technical or business compatibility, there may be numerous applications that may be inapplicable to the consumer's attributes. Accordingly, consumers are often bombarded with various applications that may be inapplicable to the consumer, making the process more difficult than necessary.